Bug busting idea

How's this for an idea

What about having a sort of forum platform for managing bugs where by users can report a problem/bug and then particular snippets of replies to the post can be marked as a solution and will appear somewhere quickly accessible like right below the first post. Then people could vote/tick a solution which worked for them, and perhaps edit the solution sections.

A user would tag packages affected by the bug (similarly to the current system with brackets) and people can select an option of whether this particular bug occurs on their system or not and they could share package versions or procedures or whatever.

I'm imagining a sort of hybrid combination of our current bug tracker and forum platform, I think perhaps it would be more productive to have both combined? So you could make a new post, explain your problem, then if you decide it's a bug, you could mark that post as a bug report and everything would be in one place.

Also, this might be a bit far fetched, but what about some way of having a dev request the output of a command remotely from a user, so a user would have some client software which would check a page perhaps of a list of commands a dev has requested output of and then accept to send the output, and then the output would be sent to the dev who requested it, or be posted on the forum post or something? This would remove the need to have to go check email or post and manually copy things across, I think it would just be easier and quicker?

Re: Bug busting idea

Do you not think that a hybrid between forums and bugtracker would be a more systematic efficient way of sorting out problems and bugs?

*EditIn the case of Archlinux I don't see why these two things need to be distinct systems/platforms

stackoverflow is something along the lines I was thinking of, but in my mind there should be a distinction between a bug report and a forum post, but they don't necessarily need to be entirely separate applications as we have. You should be able to turn a forum post into a bug report, and it can carry over all information and subscribers it has

Re: Bug busting idea

Forums are not exactly efficient, signal to noise ratio is pretty poor.What's not systematic in using a bugtracker and a mailing list?

I just think more gets discussed by users in the forums and it would be convenient to have those discussions attached to a bug report directly I think?

As Allan posted, developers focus on the bugtracker and bug reports should mention all the details necessary instead of just posting the link to a forum discussion.It's up to the people that fix the bugs to choose how they work. You can discuss an issue on the forums, find a fix, help someone improve a fix they came up with etc.If you can provide a proper fix for a bug, the bug report is generally more likely to be resolved quickly.

Re: Bug busting idea

karol wrote:

bug reports should mention all the details necessary instead of just posting the link to a forum discussion.

Yes... having to read through an entire forum page to find the details of the bug wastes a lot of time for the developer. From experience, when that happens, another bug with all the details in the report gets fixed instead.

Re: Bug busting idea

Allan wrote:

karol wrote:

bug reports should mention all the details necessary instead of just posting the link to a forum discussion.

Yes... having to read through an entire forum page to find the details of the bug wastes a lot of time for the developer. From experience, when that happens, another bug with all the details in the report gets fixed instead.